There are various problems associated with Adobe's PDF plugin for browsers (nppdf.so). Benign problems are the inability to print or produce printable Postscript files. More serious problems are crashing or an unwillingness to deal with different document versions.
xpdf is generally more robust. If you are on a UNIX/linux system then in $(HOME)/.mailcap, include a line with
application/pdf; xpdf -q %s
The advantage of this approach is the 'xpdf' is the viewer for all browsers (firefox, mozilla, lynx etc) and email software (mutt, pine, thunderbird etc).
If you are using a different environment, then to configure firefox to use xpdf instead of the Acrobat plugin,
- Let Firefox show you plugins:
- Type "about:config" in the URL window.
- Look for the browser.download.hide_plugins_without_extensions option.
- Right-click over true and toggle this value to false.
- Disable plugin and use xpdf instead:
- Go to the Edit / Preferences / Downloads / View and Edit Actions menu.
- Double-click the application/pdf file type.
- A window will pop up asking how to handle PDF files: select Open them with this application.
- Another file chooser window will pop up: enter /usr/local/bin/xpdf into the filename field, then click Open.
- This will bring you back to the previous window: press OK here.
- This will bring you back to first menu: click Close here.
- You are done: test by going to a clicking onto a PDF link.
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